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Christopher:

I have been able to read somewhat about Whiteheads idea(s) in Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's Gravitation. (Admittedly, they are almost exclusively referring to his 1922 "theory", which you have pointed out, before, was more of an illustrative model.)

Would it be fair to say that the seminal difference between Einstein's interpretation and that of Whitehead is whether the "metric" within General Relativity is the "actual"/"true" (dynamic) metric (Einstein), or an "effective" metric or other "field" built upon an (unobservable) "background" metric (also referred to as a "prior geometry")? So the "one underlying Minkowski space" you refer to is this (unobservable) "prior geometry"?

If that's the case, then Whitehead is far from alone, right now. Within attempts to reconcile General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics (more specifically Quantum Field Theory), or, in other words, to create a Quantum theory of Gravity, it seems to me that the majority (nearly all) are "prior geometry" type theories. (Super-string theory is one such that you may be familiar with.) (Incidentally, many of these theories use a vierbein or tetrad formulation of the Hilbert-Einstein equation[s].)

Have I properly grasped at least a portion of the point of divergence between Einstein's (the "orthodoxy") and Whitehead's views?

David

P.S. I get the impression that Quantum Mechanics, at least as many of these practitioners envision and/or interpret it, has a very difficult time handling curved spacetimes. My dissertation pertained to a way of extending Dirac's equation(s), in addition to other aspects, such that, at least at the "first quantization" stage, one can, indeed, handle Quantum Mechanics (at least in the form of this generalized Dirac equation) with curved spacetime. One important aspect was to recognize that the "surface" (spatial) integral involved in a (Copenhagen-type) measurement does not have to be along a "plain" of simultaneity.